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Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay

whitehouse.gov

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Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay

#171

Post by jltsiren »

biomcgary wrote: post #142
fudged71 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does “public” here refer to nationally-available, or internationally? Should I be able to access your taxpayer’s research?

Although I am generally supportive of research products (data, papers, reagents) being broadly open, I think there is the possibility of a perverse incentive to free-ride on the scientific funding of other nations. As the velocity of information (i.e., faster spread) and international mobility of academics increases, the perverse incentive goes up.

That's not a perverse incentive. It's the entire purpose of academic research. The results of the research are supposed to benefit the entire humanity, not just the entity that happened to fund it. Funders in turn have a range of motives. Some are idealistic and fund research because it's morally the right thing to do. Others are more utilitarian and believe that there are indirect benefits from having academic researchers in the society.

Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay

#172

Post by jltsiren »

ml_basics wrote: post #62

As someone in the ML community where arxiv rules supreme, I really do not understand why other communities do not also have something similar. I get that there are some perverse incentives around, but there is a relatively straightforward solution to all of the problems with journals - just publish your work on the internet first so that it's out in the open, then send it to some journal who can make money from your…

Publishing is the trivial part of academic publishing. Preprints already solved the problem of disseminating research results cost-effectively to everyone interested decades ago. The hard part is assigning merit.

Academics need merits to get jobs, promotions, grants, and prizes. The people assigned to evaluate the merits almost never have enough time and/or expertise to actually evaluate the quality of research. If they already know the person they are evaluating by reputation, they evaluate the reputation. Otherwise they use things like publication venues, citation counts, academic pedigrees, and earlier grants and prizes as proxies. Anything that tries to replace prestigious for-profit journals needs to provide non-expert evaluators a way of determining which published papers are likely to be of higher quality than the average.

Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay

#174

Post by mmastrac »

fabian2k wrote: post #134
jhallenworld wrote: post #37

Great! How about we reduce the cost of college by eliminating the equally parasitical textbook industry?

That's pretty much entirely in the hands of the universities and professors. To a large degree this is really a US-specific problem, US textbooks are easily 2-3 times as expensive as elsewhere. And the cause is likely that US universities require specific textbooks for courses, which is not how it works e.g. in Germany where I studied. I had a single course that required a specific textbook, which cost like ~50 EUR a…

This is wild as someone with a North American perspective... you can buy your own textbook?

I'm shocked at how reasonable a policy this is.

Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay

#175

Post by joebob42 »

aaaaaaaaata wrote: post #112
JamesBarney wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other difference is if you had to open source anything sold to the USG then no one would sell anything closed source to the USG. And there's lots of useful software the government wants to buy that is closed source.

Useful to who , and for what?

The usg, for whatever that piece of software says on the tin. Unless you are just asking if there is any closed source software anywhere which provides value not totally replicable using oss, which seems like a silly question.

Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay

#176

Post by majormajor »

Test0129 wrote: post #39

Having done a short stint dealing with this stuff I am glad something is being done. NIST/NSF funded several studies that I was close to that were suddenly owned by a journal who did nothing but provide a place to put it. Public money should always mean public access. Not just for journals, but for anything. If one red cent of taxpayer money goes to it, the taxpayer should get it for free. Hopefully the trend continu…

Imagine if a VC putting in "one red cent" meant that the founders and employees in a new company couldn't capture any of the returns themselves...

Why should the government be different than other investors here? Putting in money != doing the work. You have to have the funding, but you also have to have the work, and money alone doesn't guarantee success.

Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay

#177

Post by zaptheimpaler »

Not sure how connected this is to sci-hub and the academic momentum against journals and Elsevier in particular. But as a rough guess, Elseviers parent company had 1.7 billion USD net profit in 2021 [1]. In theory, that money should now start going to universities/research and partially passed along as savings to students..

[1] https://www.relx.com/investors/key-financial-data

Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay

#178

Post by fphhotchips »

majormajor wrote: post #176
Test0129 wrote: post #39

Having done a short stint dealing with this stuff I am glad something is being done. NIST/NSF funded several studies that I was close to that were suddenly owned by a journal who did nothing but provide a place to put it. Public money should always mean public access. Not just for journals, but for anything. If one red cent of taxpayer money goes to it, the taxpayer should get it for free. Hopefully the trend continu…

Imagine if a VC putting in "one red cent" meant that the founders and employees in a new company couldn't capture any of the returns themselves... Why should the government be different than other investors here? Putting in money != doing the work. You have to have the funding, but you also have to have the work, and money alone doesn't guarantee success.

Your analogy fails because it's not the people doing work in science that are capturing the returns. It's a bunch of rent-seeking publishers whose entire business model is extortion.

This is more like if a VC funded you, but Google said they wouldn't render your page in Chrome unless people paid them for access, and also you aren't allowed to take payment.

Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay

#179

Post by jacksonkmarley »

Making scientific publications open access (at least for those chasing 'respected' publications) is usually achieved by paying a large amount of money up-front to publishers. Is the implementation of this policy just to make researchers/institutions pay this extra money when they publish?

Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay

#180

Post by a1369209993 »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #153
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how any of this applies. The infrastructure isn't paid for when it's built (including the public house). It's financed on debt. Pay-by-use is just a form of tax payment. It's just that the "use" for information is nearly free, so it doesn't make sense to charge for usage. If the road was already completely paid for by tax-payers (no debt), and then a toll company wanted to operate the road for a 99% margi…

> The infrastructure isn't paid for when it's built (including the public house). It's financed on debt. Pay-by-use is just a form of tax payment. Sorry, I don't understand the relevance here. > It's just that the "use" for information is nearly free, so it doesn't make sense to charge for usage. Exactly. It's easy to provide the information to essentially infinite people for free, and there's no real downside to doi…

> and there's no real downside to doing so.

There's no legitimate downside to doing so. There is a very real illegitimate downside for copyright racketeers such as Elsevier, in that they would be much less able to engage in said racketeering.

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